'All roads lead to Rome.' It's a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European road network still reflects the old pattern of the routes built under the Roman Empire. Over two thousand years - through storms and sunshine - they've been walked by pilgrims and crusaders, tourists and travellers, armies and refugees, from Scotland in the north to Santiago de Compostela in the west, along the North African coast and the shores of the Adriatic, across Greece to Istanbul and the Holy Land.

Bringing together the history of the roads with the author's own travels along these old routes, The Roads to Rome is a journey into that past and an exploration of its legacy through successive centuries, showing how and why this world-shaping network came about and how it transformed the vast panoply of peoples it connected. Along the way we encounter spies and bandits, scheming innkeepers, streetwalkers, postmasters, soldiers and tourists, an exiled king, an aristocratic lady with her family of five, even Mussolini on his motorbike. And that's not to mention the famous names of literature who made their way along the ancient roads: Keats, Germaine de Staël, Goethe, Dickens, George Eliot, and many more. Across space and time we meander and march through a series of worlds that existed at a different pace and yet remain intimately connected to our present.

The Roads to Rome is the first book to tell the full story of these arteries of empire and channels of human activity which marked Rome's 'extraordinary greatness' then and now, a vivid portrait of lives lived and transformed through travel over two thousand years.